Monday, September 19, 2011

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya.

Except for the outrageousness of his hypocrisy,* what jars when Paul Ryan uses the word (okay, words) "class warfare" is the buff hunter-representative's lack of understanding of such a simple concept. He's got it backwards, hasn't he? Of course he has. I thought he'd been discredited for his slipped-on-the-banana-peel-of-accuracy budget proposal earlier this year but he's still lurking around, the GOP's dapper expert on all things economic. On the other hand, getting things backwards yet professing their forwardness is the right's primary oratorical weapon in its, uh, crass warfare on the English language.

Ryan suggested over the weekend that the part of the Obama plan to reduce the deficit whereby rich people pay their fair share of taxes was, sadly, class warfare, which would further divide our nation. It would spur "envy," among other mortal sins, though I can't see who'd be envying whom.

Is Ryan saying that if the poor realized how screwed they were because of the gross inequality in the distribution of wealth in America they might pay enough attention to envy their betters and, heaven forbid, do something about it? Is he suggesting that the middle classes, watching their bettors -- I mean portfolio managers -- mismanage their 401Ks and pension plans (remember those?), might clamor for more transparency by the banks and funds and corporate boards who seem to do quite all right, thank you, even as their customers suffer riding the rollercoaster of the market? Of course not. Ryan thinks that the rich will feel aggrieved that the rest of us don't just lie down and take it let them get on with creating more wealth because, as we all know, when the rich make money the extra trickles down on the rest of us. There is extra, isn't there? Or haven't the rich made enough yet? Please wake me when the gluttonous are sated at last.

Rep. Ryan has never been a genius when it comes to math. His equation that private vouchers equate to government backed health insurance was shown as faulty at best, insidiously cruel at least. And now he thinks that reeling in the rich just a little is going to make things more divisive. Backwards, Ryan! Let's look at the math. Hmmmmm, given how the top percent of earners takes more than 20 percent of our wealth (and growing), I'm not entirely sure how asking these poor rich people to pay, say, an equivalent proportion of their income as, say, their secretaries (god, sorry! "administrative assistants"), would further divide the haves from the have-lesses. Ryan thinks it would. Or perhaps he's thinking beyond mere earthly gain and is trying to save us from our sinfulness. Perhaps he has some quantifiable measure of divisiveness that this class warfare would beget. The more the well-to-do are asked to behave responsibly as citizens of our society the more, uncomfortable they get? The more irked? The more self-righteous? Of course this would make them feel bad -- more at a remove from their fellow citizens, hence: "divisive!" Q.E.D.

I thought all men were created equal and in God we trust. Clearly for Ryan the rich are more equal and in their trusts they [find] God. The rest of us can eat sausage.

Coming soon in this series: "Job Creators," "Elite" and "Socialism."

*Okay, not "outrageous"; it's expected, isn't it? The way the likes of Ryan turn words 180 degrees to suit their need is blase. Listen more closely to Ryan in the video clip above. It's as if the talking points are so embedded they require no emotion in their recitation. Soon they'll have numbers. Instead of calling it "class warfare on job creators" it'll be "doing a #2 on the #1s."

Friday, September 16, 2011

"It," of course, is LGBT [whisper] sex. You know, frolic between consenting adults who happen to share a gender, perhaps -- I mean, who can tell? Oy, the kids these days! In New York's 9th Congressional district a whole slew of Orthodox Jews, registered Democrats outnumbering registered The-Other-Kind by 3-1, really, really don't like the idea of tolerating same-sex couples. It's not natural! Okay, maybe in the animal kingdom and maybe only in song, though the closest even a genius like (shhhh!) gay Cole Porter could have got to reality is "Penguins do it...," making for an interesting conundrum should he have wished to rhyme the word "penguin." (You can imagine the composer's dulled enthusiasm for the original line's reverse: "Bees do it, birds do it..." What next? "Even educated turds do it?" Perish the (scatological) thought. No, really, perish it, sinner!)

It should come then as little surprise that the intolerant Ortho voters of New York's Fighting 9th would vote against "David Weprin...an observant Orthodox Jew, a reliable Israel hawk, and a self-proclaimed 'Scoop' Jackson fan," according to Hendrick Hertzberg in his column noting Weprin's defeat to "Republican Bob Turner, a Roman Catholic former television executive who has never so much as set foot on Israeli soil, sand, or pavement."

I think the thing that gets me isn't so much the intolerance of a group for whom that word could be -- and was -- worn as a badge. That's bad. Nor am I particularly irked that Ed "I love New York, but not its lesbians, gays, bis or transsexuals" Koch turned coat for Turner. Nor do I mind that the Ortho voting block might have been offended enough of the Tweeting 9th's previous incumbent's peccadillo to pull the other lever, if you will, even if that other lever led to the election of a former television executive of "The Jerry Springer Show," that bastion of good taste.

What I find appallingly un-American is that rabbis in the district instructed their flocks how to vote, and the flocks dutifully voted their rabbis' demands: "It is therefore Assur [forbidden according to Torah law] to vote for, campaign for, publicly honor, fund, or otherwise support the campaign of Assemblyman David Weprin, now running to succeed Anthony Weiner in the 9th Congressional district." Um, okay, I guess to preserve the sanctity of my, uh, Jewish soul, had I one, I must vote Republican.

When Christian ministers consort to influence their flocks how to vote, nay, how to think, I'm appalled but not surprised. Christian zealots see the world as theirs and the believers congregate to do their masters' bidding because it hastens the glory of the afterlife or, at least, keeps the "other" at bay. When the Jews do it it's somehow worse than appalling. Considering the age and defiant survivor-ship of our faith in the face of centuries of intolerance, I consider Judaism as, ironically, a most modern of religions, eschewing the afterlife for a now-life of doing good deeds and leaving a legacy of a world made better. How on earth -- or in heaven's eyes -- are we making the world a better place with fatwas aimed at groups of individuals, and their supporters, whose behavior is none of our goddamn business? All that nonsense is in the Old Testament. This is the New World, isn't it? Or maybe we're just arriving at the surly gates of a new New Order.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Texas may be a jobs engine, but the sort of jobs being created in Texas, for which our governor is taking too much credit, are predominantly low-wage or minimum wage jobs. Median hourly wage here is $11.20. Work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks in a year and you gross $23k a year. Can I get a side order of health care with that, please?

...If governors try hard enough, though, they can create lots of lousy jobs. They can drive out unions, attract low-wage immigrants, and turn a blind eye to businesses that fail to protect worker health and safety.

"Rick Perry seems to have done exactly this. While Texas leads the nation in job growth, a majority of Texas’s workforce is paid hourly wages rather than salaries. And the median hourly wage there was $11.20, compared to the national median of $12.50 an hour.

Texas has also been specializing in minimum-wage jobs. From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers there rose from 221,000 to 550,000 – that’s an increase of nearly 150 percent. And 9.5 percent of Texas workers earn the minimum wage or below – compared to about 6 percent for the rest of the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state also has the lowest percentage of workers without health insurance. Texas schools rank 44th in the nation in per-pupil spending.

"The Perry model of creating more jobs through low wages seems to be catching on around America."

Friday, September 9, 2011

I write this after years of contemplation and resistance. 10
years, actually. The idea of commemorating the events of that particular day is
anathema and I have resisted ever putting thoughts to paper about what I was
doing and how I felt, as if writing about it might add even a little credence or
comfort to what I believe has been a chest-thumping jingoistic travesty — a willful,
immoral obfuscation that became an excuse to perpetrate terrible injustices on
constellations of innocents at home and abroad.

But as the tenth anniversary of the fatal day approaches it
seems as if some word is due, some thoughts should be archived. If only to put
a lid on the thing once and for all. As I say later in this essay, we need to
move on. The perpetual backward look, the never-ending eulogy, the twisting of
history, the usury on our credulity — it has debilitated us as a society. It has
tested our morality and, in the years since, we have failed that test more
often than not. Our place as citizens on planet earth, among its civilizations
and all the natural wonder it has to offer, is tenuous. The wholesale change I
have seen of our turning inward, living in fear, willing to do terrible things because
of a faulty, often intentionally misleading analysis that has as its gist some
cockamamie chest-puffed call to defend the nation — it may have been an inexorable
shift over the past 30 or 40 years, but since September 11, 2001, it has
engulfed us like a flame born of an evil accelerant, an endlessly burgeoning
nihilism that couches itself in a great lie that we are somehow better than
everyone else because we suffered more than anyone else. I don’t buy it. Not on
the evidence.

Terrible things happened that day; terrible things are
happening right now. It’s time to open our eyes, hearts and minds and move
forward.

* * *

Where was I on the morning of September 11, 2001?

I was buying new soccer boots at the old Academy on the
access road of I-35 around 40th Street. I got there early in the morning and
there was practically no one in the store. I found a pair of boots I wanted and
sought a clerk to help me find the right size because, in those days, there was
a storage area “backstage,” where boxes of athletic shoes of all sorts were
kept.

After what seemed an unreasonably long wait, a large black
woman finally emerged from the curtained doorway. “A plane crashed into one of the
twin towers and it’s fallen down,” she told me as she collected my display boot’s
information and ambled back into the depths of the shoe closet to find my size. I was confused.
How could a plane knock down a skyscraper? I had images of the Empire State
Building when it was hit by a B-25 during World War II. It burned but it still
stood — today, looking up, you wouldn’t know it had ever been hit if you didn’t
know the history. Or maybe what she meant was that a plane had clipped that
huge TV antenna atop one of the World Trade Center buildings and that was the
“tower” that had fallen to earth. I imagined what a scene that would have
caused. But my meager self-explanation was nothing like the devastation I was
to learn about shortly.

“Do you want to come back and see?” She apparently had a TV
in the storeroom and was glued to the unfolding events, begrudgingly emerging every
so often to see if a customer might be out there needing her assistance. “No,
thank you,” I said. Maybe I felt stupid for not comprehending why this mattered
to her when clearly there had to be some explanation, and if she’d stop for a
moment and not be so outrageous with her description she’d see that things
weren’t so bad. Or maybe I didn’t want to learn about whatever it was that had
happened via the medium of a TV in the back room of a sports store if indeed
things were that bad.

I bought my boots and set off for the car. I turned on KUT
and discovered NPR’s morning news team was broadcasting instead of John Aielli,
the denizen of the local morning airwaves. Something had happened.

I drove back to the other side of the highway and parked
across the street from The Austin Chronicle offices, where I was a stringer for
the Arts section. I sat in my car and listened to the radio. The destruction.
The carnage. The questions. The concerns. The awe. The knowledge and the lack
of it. At a thousand-mile remove, I understood the enormity of what had
occurred even as I knew that there was nothing I could do. I just listened.

When I got to my office job downtown, the mood was a mix of gravity
and disbelief, with that adrenalin-induced bravado that some show in a crisis,
where they feel the need to take control even of the least little situation.
There were groups of people huddled around monitors watching CNN’s coverage. I
didn’t want to look. I knew enough from what I had heard to know we were going
to go hunt down whoever did this and kill them.

The agency muckety-mucks announced that anyone who wanted to
leave early could. I’m always a straggler in that sort of situation: not so
overwhelmed that I need to flee, nor so disinterested that I can get to work.
I’d leave soon. First I sat down at my desk and pulled out the spiral notebook
in my bag. I use these notebooks to craft songs and assorted other bits of
prose and poetry; some of them I return to on rare occasion when I want to see
what I was musing on at the time. I keep all those old spirals. But I’m damned
if I can find this particular one.

I remember I wrote two sentences. Just two. But they
encapsulated the entirety of my feelings.

The first was “Please let’s not go to war over this.” Though
I knew that was a foolish and futile thought. The concept of taking an eye for
an eye dehumanizes; mercy can be matched with ferocity that needn’t equate to
retributive killing. There are other ways to resolve even existential
differences. But our land is a land of vengeance and such petty considerations
have no hold on our reality. I have increasingly felt this as I have grown up.
So I knew we’d hunt down the perpetrators, or at least the closest we could
find to them, and wipe them out with all the hardware we had at our
near-limitless disposal, while displaying none of the civility or understanding
of history that such an act would chisel into what’s left of our time. It saddened
me to realize with such grim finality that we had so little self-control, so
puffed-up a sense of our patch in the tapestry of life, so inflated an idea of
the trespass that, though heinous, could hardly have exceeded so many of our
own. American defiance has always seemed overwrought and inauthentic, given our
capability —and willingness —to destroy all comers on a whim.

The second thing I wrote was “I am glad my grandparents
aren’t around to see this.” When they were alive my mother’s parents lived in
Englewood, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River via the inspiring George
Washington Bridge. My family would vacation there when I was young, making an
annual pilgrimage that would take in New York City’s amazing structures in
their glory and grunge (this was mostly in the 1970s and ’80s, after all). My
grandparents were Liberals of the old school. He was a retired salesman who’d
spent a career (post-Navy) driving up and down the east coast, she taught
English to immigrants until she, too, retired. I couldn’t imagine how
distraught they’d be to see their city (for they were transplanted New Yorkers,
moving to Englewood’s sylvan suburbs when their daughters were young) awash in
death, ash and mayhem. Worse, though, I knew they would feel the same way as I
did about the impending vengeance. Sparing them what was inevitably to follow
was a blessing.

It wasn’t until a couple of nights later that I watched TV
and saw the images that have since been replayed ad infinitum. I had been
avoiding it because I knew what I would see. It smacked of voyeurism; taking in
all those images was ogling other people’s grief. And it only reinforced my
dread at what was to come. Repetition made marshal, a beating drum, a march to
an endless, unwinnable conflict. Michelle and I picked at our dinners, and it
wasn’t until the next day that I realized that as I bathed in the cathode-ray
glow of all that stress and all that fear and all that hate and all that
disbelief, I had been mindlessly picking at the stubble underneath my lip and
had pulled out enough of my beard to render that part of my face smooth!

* * *

When I was young I remember, vaguely, the World Trade Center
being built. I was impressed as a kid because it was going to be the tallest
building in the world, for a while, anyway. I was a fan of Manhattan: the
skyline, the myriad things to do and see. We even rode to the top of one of the
towers once to check out Windows on the World. It was the most boring thing I
think we ever did in all the years we visited New York. The elevator ride took forever,
it was hot, the views weren’t any better than the ones we got from Rockefeller
Center, our go-to skyscraper for viewing all the really cool buildings in
Manhattan. I mean, come on — you could see ALL the cool buildings from Midtown.
When you’re in one of them you don’t get the same sense of awe. What was
awe-inspiring was standing at the base of the tower, pressing your face along
one of those long vertical metal lines as you looked straight up. With clouds
in the sky, the building, stretching almost beyond a child’s imagination, seemed
to sway a little. Maybe in the breeze the towers did sway. But for me the World
Trade Center was never as compelling as other attractions. When they dynamited
the roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park as part of a fun-killing
usurpation of land that left a pair of apartment buildings in that hallowed
place, now that was psychically devastating —how could they demolish the
amusement park where we’d had so much fun?

* * *

It’s time to move on from “911.” It’s in the past. It limits
us. It has led to needless, self-imposed restrictions on our way of life. It has
warped our country and my fellow countrymen. It inures the weak-willed and
fearful against any compassion for or understanding of the “other.” It offers
an excuse to power to grab more power at the abrogation of the harder, dirtier
tasks we must undertake to maintain America, let alone see it flourish.

Of course I am filled with sadness and sympathy for those
needlessly lost souls and their survivors; I cannot imagine that horror, or
rather, I can ONLY imagine it, and for that I am ruefully grateful.

People leave their homes and their loved ones every day and
never return. The reasons are as varied as the stars. Not every loss heralds a
cataclysmic shift in our way of life; but every loss is a cataclysmic shift in
SOMEONE’S life. If there is any legacy of “911” I hope it is that one day we comprehend
every life as sacred and find a way to connect with our fellow human beings with
respect, love and in peace, even as we realize that, ultimately, we’re just
visiting and we must try to leave things better than the way we found them. We
must.

About Me

Robi Polgar is a writer, director, musician and unrepentant soccer junkie who lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, children and four-footed friends. When he's not writing, directing or playing music, you can find him running around on area soccer fields.